Archetypes and archangels

Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most acclaimed contemporary Polish writers, makes a masterful second appearance in English with the publication of Primeval and Other Times, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. This engrossing, imaginative novel mingles myth, spirituality and history in the multifaceted narration of several generations of Poles who inhabit an archetypal village called Primeval.

The novel consists of 78 vignettes, which narrate the "time" of each of the dozens of characters in the book, such as "The Time of Michal," "The Time of Ruta" and so on. The Niebieski family takes prominence in the story, but other villagers, as well as angels, a witch medicine woman, a squire, a board game and a giant subterranean mushroom all play equal, intermingling roles in Tokarczuk's tale. The narrative thus takes on a polyptych quality, reminiscent of multipaneled early Christian paintings; each vignette is a discreet whole but contributes to a larger narrative. 

The novel opens in 1914 as Michal, patriarch of the Niebieski family, is called off to war on the Eastern Front. By the novel's conclusion, several generations have passed and communism has taken hold of Poland. Tokarczuk's blend of historical fiction and spiritual symbolism is present from the very first page, where Primeval is described as "the place at the centre of the universe," whose four borders are protected by archangels.

Primeval is the novel's nucleus as well as history's Petri dish; historical events are vaguely distant until they visit and irrevocably change the village and its inhabitants. In one exchange between Izydor and Ruta, two of the novel's younger characters, Ruta explains that nothing exists beyond the village's boundary. People who travel elsewhere "set off on a journey, they reach the boundary, and here they come to a standstill. Maybe they dream they're travelling onwards, that Kielce or Russia are there ? Then, after a while, they wake up and go home, and they take their dreams for memories."

Primeval and Other Times
By Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press 2010
300 Kč
248 pp

Only in the coming and going of characters is Primeval susceptible to the ravages of time, a fact brilliantly illustrated by the arrival of Russian soldiers, and finally with the prodigal Adelka's short return visit to Primeval and her aging, solitary father in the novel's closing pages.

When Primeval gets caught in the cross-fire of Russian and German soldiers, the village's inhabitants are forced to flee into the forest. Here the full scope of the novel begins to reveal itself, as the individual emotions and imaginations of each character begin to intersect with the occupying soldiers, as well as the larger, more abstract forces of history and war.

Beneath a score of interwoven narratives lies Primeval's metaphysical core: a mysterious board game called Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player. The Latin title translates literally as "foolish fire," also known as the will-o-wisp, an ethereal light that can be seen on ponds at night. The game's "instructions" contain some of the book's most religious passages, though Tokarczuk often employs Catholic symbolism. The player, Squire Popielski, is skeptical of the game at first, but becomes more obsessed with playing it until he loses his grip on reality, and even the most significant events, like the seizure of his property by communist officials, cease to arouse his interest.

"Man tempts [God], so He creeps into the beds of lovers, and there He discovers love," one passage of the game's instruction manual reads. "He creeps into the beds of old people, and there He finds transience. He creeps into the beds of the dying, and there He finds death."

Reminiscent of the eponymous game in Herman Hesse's magnum opus The Glass Bead Game, Ignis fatuus allows Tokarczuk to incorporate idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical stories into her narrative. God is treated as a quotidian character throughout the book, imbued with all the faults, shortcomings and jealousies of humans yet never quite divested of a profoundly mysterious nature. Tokarczuk manages to make the spiritual secular, and thus accessible, tangible and utilitarian, but not, thank heaven, by resorting to watered-down biblical platitudes.

Primeval and Other Times is a major novel with a scope and depth rarely achieved in contemporary literature. Its complexity extends beyond the vast number of interrelated characters contained in Tokarczuk's lushly imaginative narrative to the emotional tribulations of several decades in the history of a microcosmic village. Tokarczuk reminds us why we read novels: to enter a fictional world at once completely foreign and poignantly familiar. 

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com